Things that used to scare us but are no longer news

JAKE ELLISON, SFGATE.COM

Published
11:02 am PST, Monday, February 11, 2019

Quicksand

The myth of killer quicksand almost certainly has caused some moments of eremikophobia in those of us who grew up watching and reading fictional adventure stories a generation ago. How many of us older-than-Millennials have hesitated to step on a stretch of sand, just in case it turned out to be quicksand? According to an exhaustive 2010 report on the "Rise and Fall of Quicksand" in Slate, the quicksand trope in movies, serials and novels peaked in the 1960's and 70's.

And now? The phobia has mostly passed from our collective fears. The journal Nature likely delivered the fatal blow to the quicksand plot trick in 2005 when scientists demonstrated that a human wouldn't sink very far in a pool of the stuff. "The probability that a person will be completely sucked into the sand ... is nil. 'The Hollywood version is just incorrect,' says Thomas Zimmie, an expert in soil mechanics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute," the Nature article states.

The myth of killer quicksand almost certainly has caused some moments of eremikophobia in those of us who grew up watching and reading fictional adventure stories a generation ago. How many of us older-than-Millennials have hesitated to step on a stretch of sand, just in case it turned out to be quicksand? According to an exhaustive 2010 report on the "Rise and Fall of Quicksand" in Slate, the quicksand trope in movies, serials and novels peaked in the 1960's and 70's.

And now? The phobia has mostly passed from our collective fears. The journal Nature likely delivered the fatal blow to the quicksand plot trick in 2005 when scientists demonstrated that a human wouldn't sink very far in a pool of the stuff. "The probability that a person will be completely sucked into the sand ... is nil. 'The Hollywood version is just incorrect,' says Thomas Zimmie, an expert in soil mechanics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute," the Nature article states.

Roughly a generation ago, seemingly every adventure story and quite a few psycho-dramas had that moment, a climax of blaring orchestral horns accompanied by a discordant clash of cymbals when the protagonist, possibly accompanied by a dog or horse with an antagonist in hot pursuit, fell or stumbled or jumped unwittingly into quicksand.

"I always thought that quicksand was gonna be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be," famously quipped comedian John Mulaney in his show "New in Town (2012)."

And now it's as if quicksand never existed. It rarely if ever makes even a cameo in modern adventure stories. So what happened? How did quicksand fall off the list of plot-twist mechanisms ready at hand for script writers? We may never know. Perhaps it was just a more innocent age when nature's threats were quaint and limited to a few square yards of hidden danger instead of the global-scale catastrophes we're all now painfully fretting over.

Quicksand is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the things that used to occupy our minds and news cycles that have since faded from mass-public worry.

Of course, some things keep their place in our common understanding of the dangers we face: earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanic eruption, asteroid strikes, hurricanes, bigfoot, UFOs and so forth remain popular in our cultural understanding of the things that might kill or just frighten us.

Check out the gallery above for our list of the things we used to worry about but that no longer register in our daily news cycle.